Wednesday, July 18th, 2012
SETH BORENSTEIN, - The Christian Science Monitor
Stephan: I don't know what else to say about this trend. I have begun to think of climate deniers as heroin addicts. Their enslavement to their ignorance is killing them, and us, as a society.
WASHINGTON — An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan tore off one of Greenland’s largest glaciers. A piece of ice four times the size of Manhattan island has broken away from an ice shelf in Greenland, according to scientists in the U.S.
For several years, scientists had been watching a long crack in the floating ice shelf of the northerly Petermann Glacier. On Monday, NASA satellites showed it had broken completely, forming an iceberg covering 46 square miles (120 sq. kilometers).
The same glacier spawned an iceberg twice that size two years ago.
Researchers suspect global warming is to blame, but cannot prove it conclusively yet. Many of Greenland’s southern glaciers have been melting at an unusually rapid pace. Government scientist Ted Scambos says this break brings large ice loss much farther north.
Scientists also reported that the Arctic had the largest sea ice loss on record for June.
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WENDY KOCH, Editor - USA Today
Stephan: This is what the climate change deniers have achieved. Instead of educating people as to what is going on, teaching what we need to do to deal with climate change, and creating policies to achieve ameliorating effects, the deniers have obfuscated or dismissed a rational public conversation on this issue. As a result we have done, and will do nothing about it, and most people remain ignorant of what is going on, as this report demonstrates.
Notice particularly the partisan political differences.
Amid a summer of record-setting heat, most of Generation X ‘s young adults are uninformed and unconcerned about climate change, says a survey today.
About 5% of GenXers, born between 1961 and 1981 and now 32 to 52 years old, are ‘alarmed’ and 18% ‘concerned’ about climate change, reports the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Two-thirds, or 66%, of those surveyed last year said they aren’t sure global warming is happening and 10% said they don’t believe it’s occurring.
‘Most Generation Xers are surprisingly disengaged, dismissive or doubtful about whether global climate change is happening and they don’t spend much time worrying about it,’ said author Jon D. Miller.
The report comes as several Obama administration officials have recently linked extreme weather to climate change. In a report last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cited six weather events last year and said that atmospheric changes caused by the burning of fossil fuels made Texas’ heat wave, for example, 20 times more likely than it would have been in the 1960s.
The Generation X survey of about 3,000 adults, the fourth in a continuing series, found a small but statistically significant decline in Gen Xer’s attention to climate change. In 2011, […]
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JOE STRUPP, - Media Matters for America
Stephan: Further evidence of the corruption of the media as the result of an intentioned focused campaign by the Right. These people are absolutely shameless, and have no interest in national wellness. Only in their own power and profit.
When Idaho state legislators proposed a seemingly uncontroversial bill to ban access to commercial tanning beds by minors earlier this year, IdahoReporter.com took up the issue with force.
The state news Web site, an affiliate of the conservative Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity and overseen by the free market Idaho Freedom Foundation, posted six stories on the proposal between Feb. 16 and March 22, when the bill was voted down in a state Senate Committee.
The Franklin Center is a multimillion-dollar organization whose Web sites and affiliates provide free statehouse reporting to local newspapers and other media across the country. Funded by major conservative donors, staffed by veterans of groups affiliated with the Koch brothers, and maintaining a regular presence hosting right-wing events, the organization boasts of its ability to fill the void created by state newsroom layoffs.
The group’s editors claim that their ‘professional journalism’ work is walled off from the organization’s more nakedly political operations and say that their ‘pro-taxpayer, pro-liberty, free market perspective’ doesn’t compromise their accuracy or independence. But many journalism professionals — even newspaper editors who reprint the work of Franklin Center affiliates in their own pages — speak warily of the group’s ideological […]
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Stephan: The Mafia as a national force, let alone an international one, did not exist before alcohol prohibition. It was the unintended consequence created by the Volstead Act. Marijuana prohibition allowed the shadow force in the world economy that emerged from that first prohibition to grow to the level it has today. Its drug profits have financed everything from elephant ivory smuggling to child pornography. The international Mafia, the New American Slavery, and the American gulag all are creatures of this insane prohibition. Like a cancer it is literally eating us alive as a culture, and the Obama administration bears much responsibility for its continuance.
A groundbreaking United Nations report today revealed that cross-border criminal activity generates $870 billion every year, more then six times the amount of global development aid.
The United Nations’ Office on Drugs and Crime today rolled out the report – the first of its kind – in tandem with a global awareness-raising campaign meant to draw attention to the global effects of transnational crime.
Researchers found that drug trafficking is ‘the most lucrative
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DAVID EDWARDS, - The Raw Story
Stephan: Pat Robertson is known for goofy statements and, normally, I never run them. But I have been noticing a growing hate trend in the pre-millennial dispensationalist 'Christian' community -- what most people now mean when they say they are 'Christians' -- and this is a representative example. This kind of hate and ignorance should be publicly resisted.
Televangelist Pat Robertson on Monday offered a little relationship advice to a viewer who said he had a Muslim girlfriend: just dump her.
A viewer named Brad wrote to Robertson to ask what he should do about his Muslim girlfriend because he was ‘worried that leaving her will turn her off to Christianity and, it isn’t exactly Christ-like.
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